The Shining Girls, a novel from South African writer Lauren Beukes, provides an antidote to the media storm around Bundy with a murderer who is repugnant both inside and out.

Harper Curtis is a Depression-era drifter with a sociopathic streak a mile wide. Early in the novel, he murders a blind woman in front of her young son. As a result of this heinous crime, Harper is rewarded with a key to a house that serves as a kind of portal that permits him to travel forward in time.

Harper may possess the key to the house, but the house possesses him, and it sends the drifter on a maniacal mission to kill “the shining girls.”

“Time-traveling serial killer” is the kind of can’t-miss elevator pitch that electrifies agents, editors, and movie producers. Many writers would take this high concept conceit and turn it into an improbable slasher with pithy quips such as, Time’s up, Harper is coming!

But Beukes is an award-winning science fiction writer and isn’t interested in that. It’s what she does with her characters that is truly remarkable. Instead of making Harper some inter-dimensional super stalker, she focuses on the victims: an African-American factory worker, a dancer who douses herself in radium as part of her act, a Korean-American housing activist, to name just a few.

They aren’t quick sketches, but meticulously crafted set pieces that reveal the hopes and dreams of these women during a difficult period in Chicago’s history. She centers them in the narrative, and in a manner that makes her novel a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction. When Harper comes along to dispatch these women, which he does with brutal efficiency, the murders always feel like a disruption and a loss.

Harper is no Ted Bundy. He appears in his shabby drifter clothes and walks with a limp that allows him to hobble through time unseen and unremarked upon. His infirmity causes others to underestimate him—until it’s too late.

The Shining Girls is a fast-paced love letter to Chicago’s underbelly and it’s ultimately Beukes’ passion for history that stands out in her breakthrough novel.

And if serial killers aren’t your thing, there’s always Beukes’ next book, Motherland, a dystopian adventure set to be published in May.